Omar Fawzi

I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at McGill University. I am very fortunate to be advised by Luc Devroye and Patrick Hayden. Before that, I was at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and spent a year at the Master Parisien de Recherche en Informatique.

Publications

1. The NOF Multiparty Communication Complexity of Composed Functions
   Anil Ada, Arkadev Chattopadhyay, Omar Fawzi, Phuong Nguyen
   ECCC:TR11-155
   Conference version: to appear in the 39th International Conference on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP'12).
2. Quantum to Classical Randomness Extractors
   Mario Berta, Omar Fawzi, Stephanie Wehner
   arXiv:1111.2026
   Conference version: to appear in CRYPTO'12.
3. Classical communication over a quantum interference channel
   Omar Fawzi, Patrick Hayden, Ivan Savov, Pranab Sen and Mark Wilde
   to appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory arXiv:1102.2624
   Accepted to QIP 2012 as a featured talk.
   Conference version: Quantum interfence channels, Proceedings of the 2011 Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing.
4. Longest path distance in random circuits
   Nicolas Broutin and Omar Fawzi
   arXiv:1101.5547
   
5. From Low-Distortion Norm Embeddings to Explicit Uncertainty Relations and Efficient Information Locking
   Omar Fawzi, Patrick Hayden, Pranab Sen
   arXiv:1010.3007
   Accepted to QIP 2011 as a plenary talk. [slides, video available here]
   Conference version: Proceedings of the 43rd ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC'11), pp. 773-782.
6. Depth properties of scaled attachment random recursive trees
   Luc Devroye, Omar Fawzi, Nicolas Fraiman
   to appear in Random Structures and Algorithms.
   Conference version: The height of scaled attachment random recursive trees, Proceedings of the 21st International Meeting on Probabilistic, Combinatorial, and Asymptotic Methods in the Analysis of Algorithms (AofA'10), pp. 129-142. [slides]
7. Simulating the Dickman distribution
   Luc Devroye and Omar Fawzi
   Statistics and Probability Letters, vol. 80, pp. 242-247, 2010.

Teaching

• Fall 2011: TA for COMP 362 Honors Algorithms. Office hours: Mon. 9:30am-11:30am.
• Fall 2010: TA for COMP 362 Honors Algorithms.
• Fall 2009: TA for COMP 690 Probabilistic Analysis of Algorithms.
• Winter 2009: TA for COMP 251 Algorithms and Data Structures.

Other documents

1. Maximum matching in streaming models
   My master's thesis (2008), on maximum matching in streaming models (in French), under the supervision of Frédéric Magniez. We give lower bounds on streaming algorithms computing approximate maximum matchings in graphs.
   
2. Simulating perpetuities using coupling from the past
   My research report of a project (2007) on simulating perpetuities using coupling from the past, under the supervision of Luc Devroye.
   
3. Quantum coin flipping
   My licence thesis (2006), on quantum coin-flipping (in French), under the supervision of Frédéric Magniez. We give a simple proof for the bias of a quantum coin-flipping protocol. The protocol is rather different than the first protocols achieving this bias of 0.25. This bias was the best known until the paper Optimal quantum strong coin flipping of André Chailloux and Iordanis Kerenidis, which is based on Mochon's constructions of weak coin-flipping protocols with arbitrarily small bias.